Cross Kill w-4

by Garry Disher

  ‘All yours,’ Jardine said.

  Wyatt made an approximate count of the money. There was over two hundred thousand there, that’s all he was interested in knowing. He began to stack it into a nylon bag, wanting to feel secure but knowing he wouldn’t be until he was well clear of this place. Two hundred thousand dollars was peanuts compared to the millions the Mesic operation would earn for the Outfit, but that didn’t mean the Outfit intended to part with it. He zippered the bag closed and joined Jardine in the hall. ‘We’ll find you,’ one or other of the Mesics began, but Wyatt closed the door on their voices.

  ****

  Leo had recognised the drunk from the Volvo, only this time it was no act the man was putting on. He didn’t recognise the second man, only his style-economical, a flat expression on the runnelled river-stone face. The men weren’t gentle but they weren’t rough either. They didn’t apologise, raise their voices, speak unnecessarily, say who they were or what they were doing. They were entirely mechanical and disinterested and Leo went along with it. What Bax had said made sense. Tackling them would have been a mistake.

  Then the men split up. Leo heard a drill bite into metal and he knew it was the safe. He didn’t say anything, got comfortable on the floor, turned his wrists so that the handcuff bracelets didn’t cut off his circulation. Victor and Stella were doing it too.

  Then Victor said, turning his head to look at Stella, ‘See? We’re wide open. They just walked in. No security at all.’

  ‘Get lost, Victor.’

  ‘The Mesics are a pushover, that’s what this will look like.’

  ‘Just shut up.’

  Victor’s voice was low and insistent. ‘Think about it. It’s time to get out of this Mickey Mouse business, into something where the people you meet don’t have records, don’t wear greasy overalls, where your money’s secure in some Cayman Islands bank, not sitting around in a safe waiting to be picked up by a couple of hoods, where you’re paying off the bloody police commissioner, not some sleazy plainclothes cop like Bax.’

  Leo heard his wife say venemously, ‘You’ll be paid off, Victor. Just shut up.’

  ‘I don’t want to be paid off. I want to put my money where it’s going to quadruple itself every few months.’

  Leo listened. Victor had been saying things like this to him all week when Stella wasn’t around, drawing flow charts, jabbing his finger at columns of figures. Toward the end, it seemed to make sense. Victor had also said, ‘See if you can convince the bitch-no offence, old son.’ Leo had tried. He wasn’t sure that she’d listened, though. Now, chained up while their house was being robbed, Leo tried again. ‘He’s got a point, Stel.’

  But then the man with the flat look of a killer came back from his search of the property, and shortly after that Leo heard the safe blow open. He was silent, and it was a strain on him. He watched the men leave. When they were gone he jerked the handcuffs, but it was useless and suddenly every clock in the place chose that moment to chime eight o’clock.

  ****

  Thirty-four

  They worked the signal using cellular phones provided by Rossiter. While Jardine opened the gate, Wyatt called Towns. The ringing tone sounded once and when Towns answered he said, ‘All clear.’ He listened for Towns’s ‘okay’, broke the connection, climbed behind the wheel of Victor Mesic’s Saab and followed Jardine’s Telecom van through the gate and onto the street.

  Wyatt wasn’t carrying the money. The money was in the Telecom van, giving it a second margin of security. Wyatt was allowing for the bored or nosy patrol cop who might just decide to give a Saab driver a hard time but who wouldn’t look twice at a Telecom van. The first margin was Wyatt himself. He drove several hundred metres behind Jardine and he watched the traffic ahead of the van, behind it, next to it. If the Outfit wanted the two hundred thousand badly enough they might try a snatch in the open. Wyatt knew what to look for: he’d pulled stunts like it himself, running courier vans off the road to snatch bullion, furs, Scotch, oil paintings. ‘When you’re on the freeway,’ he’d told Jardine, ‘don’t let yourself get boxed in by heavy trucks working in pairs; stay in the far lane; don’t let yourself get forced onto an exit ramp or the dividing strip.’

  ‘And off the freeway?’

  ‘Off the freeway look out for roadworks, broken-down cars, any sort of emergency where you’re asked to slow down or stop or detour. If they put a car across the road, don’t stop, ram the rear of it at an angle.’

  ‘And fly through the windscreen.’

  ‘I doubt it. With most cars there’s no engine and not much structural reinforcement at the back. If you hit it in the right place you’ll shift it sideways and get through.’

  Nothing like that happened on the roads out of Templestowe. They joined the freeway at Doncaster Road. There was very little traffic going into the city. The space-age lights floated high above the broad dreaming lanes and Wyatt followed Jardine at a steady 90 kph along a shallow valley that gave no sense of the city’s tiled roofs and street grids and three million people.

  They got off the freeway at Hoddle Street, leaving the Saab and the Telecom van in a side street and switching to rented Mazdas left there earlier in the day. Jardine had rented the cars from separate firms using fake ID. Again Wyatt tailed Jardine. They kept to the speed limit, obeyed the traffic laws, still wore the gloves.

  They made a final switch in Spring Street, knowing there were always taxis waiting outside the Windsor. Avoiding a bag snatch, Jardine parked opposite, cut across the road on foot, and got into the back seat of the first taxi on the rank. The taxi pulled away and Wyatt stayed with it, three car-lengths behind, through Fitzroy, Carlton and Clifton Hill. The time was 8.30 pm.

  By 8.45 they were in Northcote. Wyatt double-parked well back from the taxi, lights out, and watched as Jardine paid off the driver and entered the corner milk bar. The taxi driver was there for a minute or so, writing up his log, answering a radio call. When he was gone, Wyatt drove up to the milk bar, collected Jardine and drove out of the street.

  They left the Mazda two blocks away from the Northcote house and walked the rest of the way. Jardine hadn’t understood the need for this. He’d said to Wyatt that afternoon, ‘You can trust me. I won’t run out on you.’ Wyatt told him, ‘I know that. I don’t trust the Outfit. We stick to each other the whole way with this. If you’re in sight and you get attacked, I know what to do about it. If you’re out of sight and they jump you, I won’t know it.’

  Jardine had nodded. ‘You cover all the angles-some might say obsessively.’

  ‘It’s how I stay alive,’ Wyatt had told him.

  It was 8.55. The streets were quiet, settling into darkness as front-porch lights went out. Wyatt and Jardine slipped into the grounds of the house and went around it twice. The first time they searched the small yard; the second time they checked the strips of tape Wyatt had pasted to the windows and outside doors. Nothing had disturbed them.

  They finished at the front door. Jardine went in first, the money in the bag over his shoulder. ‘Made it,’ he said, half-turned to hold the door for Wyatt.

  ‘We’ll see,’ Wyatt said.

  They were home, they had the money, but still Wyatt didn’t let go of his expectation of trouble. He followed Jardine into the hallway and waited crammed up against him as Jardine put his hand to the light switch. The switch clicked once, then again, but there was no light and Wyatt started to say, wait.

  The words froze in his throat. He heard a smooth metallic snap as someone in the shadows jacked a shell into the firing chamber of a semi-automatic pistol, and then he heard the shot.

  The pistol had been fitted with a suppressor. The baffles contained the sound as a flat cough, and Wyatt connected it to the sudden jerk of Jardine’s body ahead of him. He tried to avoid the big man, tried to twist away and find his.38, but Jardine slammed backwards into him and they both went down, Wyatt face down on the dusty, fibrous carpet. His back muscles knotted together, expecting a follow-u
p shot.

  It didn’t come. Instead, there were useless tugging sounds and Wyatt could sense panic behind them. The pistol had jammed. Semi-automatics will do that. It was why he rarely used them. He pushed up, snarling, ridding his body of Jardine’s weight.

  It did him no good at all. He saw an arm swing at him, the pistol held like a club, and hunched away as if that would make his skull elastic. The rest was all pain.

  ****

  Thirty-five

  He didn’t know how long he’d been lying there. He blinked awake and turned his head to check the time. That was a mistake. The pain cut through him and he felt a faint tug on his scalp as the blood crust broke. 9.15 pm. He hadn’t been out for long. He didn’t remember Jardine until he became conscious of distressed, shallow breathing and felt the weight of his friend’s body across his legs.

  This time Wyatt was ready for the stabbing in his head. He rolled out from under Jardine and found a light switch in the front room. It leaked enough light into the hall to tell him that Jardine had been hit in the head and that his upper body and the carpet under him were blood soaked. He reached around and explored Jardine’s scalp with his fingers a little at a time. It didn’t tell him anything, only that Jardine’s hair was clogged with blood.

  Wyatt leaned against the wall to think about it. The bag with the money was gone. Jardine needed attention. The Outfit gun had jammed, meaning they might come back to finish the job. Rose, he guessed. She’d been his dangerous shadow from the start. A smudge on the wall caught his eye. He looked up to see a series of them, shoe marks reaching up to an open manhole in the ceiling. She’d got in through the roof, and she’d taken out the light bulb.

  Wyatt used the telephone in the kitchen. He was expecting Ross or Eileen to answer, not the son. The son was supposed to be in remand. He didn’t give his name. ‘Your dad there?’

  ‘I’ll just get him,’ Niall Rossiter said.

  When Rossiter came on Wyatt said, ‘I need a doctor who won’t ask questions.’

  Rossiter took that in. ‘You hurt bad?’

  ‘Jardine’s been head shot.’

  ‘Let’s see,’ Rossiter said, and Wyatt listened to him thinking. ‘There’s Ounsted.’

  ‘I’ve heard the name. How can I get hold of him?’

  ‘He does a moonlight flit every few months,’ Rossiter said. ‘Hang on a sec,’ and Wyatt heard the receiver clatter onto some hard surface before he could warn Rossiter to keep his trap shut.

  Rossiter came back on the line with an address and telephone number in North Carlton. ‘According to the wife it’s still current.’ There was a pause. ‘What went wrong?’

  ‘I’ve got some sorting out to do,’ Wyatt said, with a chill that seemed to reach Rossiter on the end of the line. Rossiter said, ‘Right,’ hurriedly and rang off.

  Wyatt took Jardine to the North Carlton address in the rental car. The doctor lived in a small, flat-faced, cement-rendered place sandwiched between a couple of stately brick terraces on a leafy street. It was a street of academics, TV writers and yoga fanatics who drove Landcruisers and soft-top VWs, but Ounsted’s car matched his house. It was parked outside it, a Peugeot station wagon, ancient, soft-springed, rust in the doors.

  The man who answered his knock was slight, undernourished, dressed in a crumpled suit with broad lapels. He smelt of whisky and cigarettes and tried to hide it with fluttering, gingery hands. His face had the chalky shut-away look of a man who shudders at the sun. He looked about sixty, but was probably younger. Ounsted had been struck off the register fifteen years ago and now he treated patients who suffered from the kinds of injuries and ailments they couldn’t let the authorities know about. He supplied morphine, plugged gunshot wounds, sewed up knife cuts.

  ‘There’s a lane behind the house,’ he told Wyatt. ‘Drive around while I get the surgery ready. We’ll bring your friend in the back way.’

  The lane was narrow; the Mazda juddered on the bluestone cobbles. Wyatt stopped halfway along, the engine idling, waiting for Ounsted to open the gate. Every back wall except Ounsted’s had been replaced in the past ten years. Some were topped with jasmine-choked lattice. Ounsted’s rear entrance was a warped, padlocked wooden gate on hinges, four metres high. He’d coiled barbed wire around the upper frame.

  Wyatt could smell booze and tobacco inside the house as well, but there was a layer of antiseptic under that and one of the rooms was clean enough: a drugs cabinet, stainless steel trays, lights, an operating table. The rest of the house was like the doctor himself, battling and apologetic.

  They put Jardine on the operating table and Ounsted gave him a painkiller and a sedative. ‘He’ll be okay for the moment,’ Ounsted said, a kind of clipped professionalism entering his voice. ‘Now you’d better let me look at you.’

  Wyatt sat where Ounsted could examine his head. ‘You’ll live. Bruising, swelling, and a small patch of broken skin. A painkiller and you’ll be okay. Just take it easy for a while. Rest up for a couple of days.’

  ‘I’ve got things to do.’

  ‘Oh, I know that,’ Ounsted said. ‘I was just going through the motions, that’s all.’

  Then he went to work on Jardine, Wyatt helping him to wash the blood from Jardine’s head and clean and bandage the wound. The bullet had scored a shallow trench above the right ear. Ounsted murmured as he worked: ‘A fraction further to the right and he’d be in worse shape than this. He’ll need to stay here for a few days. He’s a lucky man. But it’s amazing what the body can withstand. I remember…’

  The man wanted to talk. Wyatt screened him out. He thought about his options. He’d start with Kepler, but it didn’t have to be immediately-the Outfit would always be there. What he needed most now was rest, a safe house for the night. When Ounsted was finished he said, ‘How much do I owe you?’

  Ounsted seemed to take an interest in the carpet. ‘Two fifty should cover it.’

  ‘I’ll give you three hundred,’ Wyatt said. ‘I need a bed here for the night.’

  Ounsted looked at Wyatt professionally. ‘Wise man. You look knackered. I’ll give you something for the pain, it’ll help you sleep.’

  ‘No drugs.’

  ‘Suit yourself. The spare room’s through here.’

  Ounsted took Wyatt to a small room at the front of the house. There were two narrow beds in it. Wyatt considered them: one was as good as the other. He stood in the centre of the room and stared at Ounsted. The doctor grew uncomfortable and moved toward the door. ‘Bathroom’s down the hall. I’ll see you in the morning.’

  ****

  Thirty-six

  Something woke him, some shift in the atmosphere. He lay on his back, feeling his skin creep, his nerve ends coming alive.

  He knew where he was, and that he felt rested, the pain in his head less acute. No one was shooting at him, screaming at him to get on the ground, aiming lights in his eyes. In fact, the house was peaceful. But it felt wrong.

  He lay still, feeling the blood pulse in him. Maybe he simply was cold. He pulled the bedclothes to his neck. The substance of his half-asleep, half-awake condition clarified with the movement, and he remembered that there had been the sound of a telephone, of a voice in the far reaches of the house.

  Wyatt supposed that Ounsted’s nights were like that, sleep punctuated by calls to come save a life or inject a hit. He concentrated, eliminating the expected sounds of Ounsted’s life, his house, this street at night, to see what he was left with.

  He heard Ounsted at the front door, then at the gate that opened onto the footpath. There were Venetian blinds in the window. He forced an aperture in the slats and looked out. Ounsted, wearing a coat and a hat, carrying the medical bag. Wyatt watched him get into the Peugeot, crank it into life, turn on the lights. Ounsted turned right at the end of the street and after that it was quiet.

  Wyatt dozed. He would kill Kepler and leave it at that. If he went after Rose, after Towns, he would have to go after the whole bunch of them and he didn’t have the t
ime or the energy or the resources to do that. The orders had come from Kepler to begin with. Towns would take over from Kepler. Towns was someone Wyatt could make a deal with that would stick. The money mattered but he’d never get the actual two hundred thousand back. He’d have to screw the money out of the Outfit some other way.

  Ounsted was away for almost half an hour. Wyatt recognised the Peugeot’s rattling tappets and complaining differential, and checked the time: 11.02 pm. He clacked a gap in the blind, watched the doctor park the car, come through the gate, shut the door behind him.

  There was the problem of getting to Sydney, getting at Kepler. It would take time and it would take money. Wyatt had all the time he needed but his funds were low. He would do what he’d done in the past, hire himself out to a crooked insurance agent or snatch the daily take of a restaurant in a suburb where nothing much ever happened, the kind of small-time hit that would earn him a bankroll but no credit at all.

  Wyatt slept then, until Ounsted turned on the bedside light and prodded him awake-only it wasn’t Ounsted, it was Rose, wearing the doctor’s hat and coat and holding her own gun in her hand.

  That explained the phone call. They’d called Ounsted out of the house and Rose had switched places with him.

  Rose stepped clear of the bed and grinned down at Wyatt. ‘The legend himself. Shame he had to die in bed with his boots off.’ She centred the barrel on Wyatt’s forehead. ‘You can close your eyes if you like.’

  She wasn’t good at this after all. She shouldn’t have stopped to speak to him. She was letting emotion and competition get the better of her. She was gloating, letting him know he’d lost, letting him see her, making sure he knew he was going to die and who was pulling the trigger. It was unprofessional and Wyatt shot her through the bedclothes. There was a spurt of blood and tissue and she slammed back against the wardrobe, then forward onto the floor. Her limbs thrashed but, as Wyatt watched, there was a final heave, an involuntary finger spasm and then she was still.